Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> toruvinn wrote:
>> I was always wondering, though, why PostgreSQL uses this approach and not
>> its catalogs.
> It does use the catalog for most things. THe flatfile is used for the
> situations where the catalogs are not yet ready to be read.
Now that we have SQL-level CONNECT privilege, I wonder just how much
functionality would be lost if we got rid of the flat files and told
people they had to use CONNECT to do any per-user or per-database
access control.
The main point I can see offhand is that password checking would have
to be done a lot later in the startup sequence, with correspondingly
more cycles wasted to reject bad passwords.
regards, tom lane